How I prune our apple trees

Some of the apple trees are older than me. They could be even 50 years old. We used to have ten of them but now only four old trees remain. Then we also have a few 20–30-year-old trees and several really young ones. In addition, we also have some plum trees and a pear tree. Mostly they serve as beauty trees but some years they yield a decent harvest.

Every autumn I install a wire fence around the younger trees so that deer and rabbits would not harm them. I’ve made the mistake of not protecting a young tree - it never saw next spring. Deer and rabbits love young tree’s bark and tender branches.

In order to keep the trees healthy and pretty I prune them every spring. I try to do this in April before the leaves start to develop. This means I need to get my ladder and trusty pruning shears and spend a whole day climbing and trimming the trees.

I start by trying to identify if there are any dead branches. Then I cut off all the new sprouts that started to grow during the previous season. As the trees are old and I prune them every year, I don’t really need to make any decisions on what to cut and what to keep. However, this is different with the younger trees. There I need to design the crown, decide which branches to keep and which are growing in the “wrong” direction. The end goal is to have a nice-looking tree, without dense batches. Sunlight should be able to reach the fruits and the crown should be “airy” so it would be an inconvenient place for pests to reside.

Once everything is pruned and cleaned up, I step back, admire the trees and feel happy. But it does not end there. Trees will grow new sprouts very fast during spring, early summer. End of June is a perfect time to prune the trees once again. New saplings are still fresh and I can remove them without shears. I only need to be careful to not damage the bark when breaking them away. By this time, there are tiny apples on the trees and it is easy to see how removing fresh saplings allows sunshine to reach the fruits.

This is also the time when I sometimes catch pests. Most common in our orchard is the apple ermine - Yponomeuta malinellus. If they are present, I encounter their larvae during the June pruning. Usually there are dozens of worms on a leaf – or what has remained of it after their feasting. I carefully cut that branch off and dispose of it in the bonfire. I have not seen them en masse lately but there have been summers when entire trees were full of them. Not a nice sight!